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God doesn't need to feel hunger to completely know the feeling. He invented the feeling.
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God doesn't need to feel hunger to completely know the feeling. He invented the feeling.Hunger may be a good example of something we can feel but God can't. (he might feel hunger, not sure)
He certainly is concerned about hunger, helping the crops to grow by sending rain and sunshine and hungry workers to harvest it, and motivating those with food to feed the hungry.
That is PROOF for those who think, "God is not human, how can he know?"Don't know if these verses have been brought up. It sounds like the reason that God can sympathize with our weaknesses is because He himself has experienced beeing tempted. Thoughts?
Therefore, since we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold fast our confession. For we do not have a high priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but One who has been tempted in all things as we are, yet without sin.
— Hebrews 4:14-15
That is PROOF for those who think, "God is not human, how can he know?"
Btw, I think it also does not mean quite what we want it to mean —that he was tempted by way of, for eg, the habit of sin, or to desire someone else's wife, etc— but more likely that he was indeed tempted in every area we are —sexual, political power, and other categories of desire, and any other area of temptation such as is common to man.
While reading your post I was thinking about the body of Christ (the church) and how when one part suffers we all suffer. Not sure if that plays into this somehow, or not. That may be part of the meaning of the "body" of Christ. Hurt the church and it hurts Christ. Bless the church and you bless Christ. "When did we see you hungry and feed you...?"Thank you for the response, I forgot about this thread, but now that I think about it, perhaps I am not looking at this in the right way.
Is my conscious experience wholly private, even hidden from God? I don't think so. Is the eye with which I see the same eye with which God sees what I see? There is long tradition, mostly scholastic, which claims that God does not know as we know. We have to reason and discover in order to learn, but since all things are created by God, God knows them through God's own Self immediately and not in some mediated way, and so on. All of that makes sense, but does that preclude the possibility that God is intimately aware of my conscious experience as I experience it. I don't see why that should be the case. If it does preclude it, then perhaps the theological thinking influenced by Aristotle and other pagan philosophers was unhelpful, which would not be surprising.
Christians tacitly assume God is privy to our conscious experience in so far as we engage in silent, mental prayer. And then we have passages which speak of God knowing our thoughts and what we are going to say before we think or say them. At any rate, let's say for the sake of argument that God is aware of my conscious experience as I experience it. If that is the case, then God knows my experience just as I know it. More than that, God knows my experience better than I know it since God is privy to unconscious motives and whatever else is down there that passes by my awareness. Add to that, God knows this ultra-intimate experience in all sentient beings.
Assuming God knows our lived experience just as we do, then we can say that God knows our experience of sin, and again knows it better than we do. How we experience desire and then act on that, God knows that, too, because God knows our experience better than we do. The uncomfortable aspect of this is when I sin, I end up dragging God through that experience, which is a horrific thought in itself. But I see no reason to assume this should not be the case. It is not as if God is sinning, even though God knows my sin experience intimately, since the responsibility for my sin is my own desire. If I had chosen well, that would have been what I "dragged" God through instead of my sin. I think this speaks to how much God loves us, as well, in that God is willing to endure our mental life, as bad as it can be, for the end goal of redeeming it.
And, what does our evil really do to God? The cross/resurrection shows us evil has no power over God, so it's not as if we can taint God or rub off some of God's holiness. If God can become incarnate, God can handle it. What is an odd idea to me, is the idea that God learned something new through the incarnation, as if God would not know our experience until God became one of us. Perhaps that stems from our experience of being the only one who knows our own experience. But I don't think that's the case; God knows that, too. The incarnation was always going to be. All things have been created through Christ, without whom nothing exists, all persist in existence through him, and all things are reconciled back to God through him. It is just a matter of pride or ignorance for us to assume our mental life is the one exception, the one area God can't touch.
If any of that is correct, which I have no idea if it is, then what could we say about passages like "Because he himself suffered when he was tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted"? Perhaps that's more of a revelation to us than it is to God. We need to know that God knows our experience of temptation and suffering, and the incarnation communicates that, but that doesn't mean that God didn't know all along. We have a bad habit, as Christians, of placing preconceived attributes on God, ideas mostly concerned with divine transcendence and gleaned from various philosophies, before we take into consideration the incarnation and what that says about God. Then, we spend centuries trying to get those preconceived ideas to fit the incarnation. Perhaps that is backwards, and we should begin with the incarnation and then ask, "What is God like?"
This ties in as well. What Jesus said to Saul on the road to Damascus. @public hermitWhile reading your post I was thinking about the body of Christ (the church) and how when one part suffers we all suffer. Not sure if that plays into this somehow, or not. That may be part of the meaning of the "body" of Christ. Hurt the church and it hurts Christ. Bless the church and you bless Christ. "When did we see you hungry and feed you...?"
Yes I’m trying to understand how to make sense out of a few things like you are, and like the ‘Did Jesus Lust?’ thread that @Pavel Mosko is referencing. So God is omniscient, therefore in order for a thing such as “Having a lust experience” to exist in reality then God necessarily must have knowledge of what that is like. But to have knowledge of a lust experience is to have had a lust experience. If you run into a person who has never had a lust experience before then that person wouldn’t have knowledge of what it is.
We say that God surely knows love, forgiveness, compassion, decision making, etc, because we know those things, and if we know them then God being much greater than us in every way also knows them. But I have been getting a little tripped up when looking at this idea from the view of mental properties that are not said to be good ones, like lust. Or even something morally neutral like being hungry, how does a spirit God know a hunger experience without being able to say that He has had/felt the experience before? To have it is to know it.
…because at the end of the day I believe that the transition from empirical data based explanations to explanations of what mental experiences ARE marks a major dividing line of human understanding. Humans are spectacular at grasping physical cause & effect style explanations, however mental experiences are of an altogether entirely different ontology, and we frankly suck at giving similar levels of explanatory explanations like we do for scientific/physical explanations.
I had a specific reply…but hold on…there is perhaps a light bulb trying to come on from me reading a couple things in Public Hermit’s post lolBtw, (not to be saying that you mean to be doing this, but) it sounds like you consider God capable of being like us, needing to suppress something of himself, and of doing good because it is better than not to do good. He is not like us. He needn't consider which is better to do. 'Better' and 'good' are what they are because God is good.
Is being tempted itself a sin?
Temptation is an appeal to the lusts of the flesh to do sin. Temptation is not sin however until it is acted upon and desired and made our own in thought, word or action. If temptation was sin, that would make Jesus a sinner when he was tempted in the wilderness. Yet we know from the scriptures Jesus was sinless being Gods perfect sacrifice for the sins of the world. If Jesus was a sinner we are all lost because only a perfect sinless sacrifice for sin (Hebrews 4:13) can take the sin of the sinner as it is written that the wages of sin is death. If Jesus was a sinner then he would need to die for His own sins and would not be able to die for the sins of the world.Yes, thank you. What is temptation? Isn't it desire? If I have the slightest desire to do other than God's will, isn't that sinful?
I don’t either, the private subjective nature of minds would definitely break down and not hold at the level of God. But of course it’s the very consequence of this (TOTAL omniscience) that is causing my confusion (us being capable of impure subjective mental filth, confusion, etc).Is my conscious experience wholly private, even hidden from God? I don't think so.
So as I just said I am throwing out hidden subjective knowledge when we reach the level of God…and now, because I am being a total stickler for the term omniscient, I do understand that God will process things differently than us, however it’s not that I keep trying to anthropomorphize God it is rather that I keep saying that TRUE omniscience would ALSO entail being able to know every experience “From the vantage point” of every single species that has ever existed.Is the eye with which I see the same eye with which God sees what I see?
Hold the phone!! This is getting good!! You make a very interesting point here (and perhaps people have already made this point to me 17 times but it takes 17 times for the lightbulb to illuminate lol), God would eternally & immediately know all lousy thought experiences, and there is no “Process to get to this knowledge at all” like with us. Very interesting because this would be like a person having already gone through being a drug addict (so they know the experience) so that they know the experience but they don’t partake in the experience because it’s behind them…but in God’s case you necessarily have to add the twist that the partaking part never took place, just the eternally innate knowledge part.There is long tradition, mostly scholastic, which claims that God does not know as we know. We have to reason and discover in order to learn, but since all things are created by God, God knows them through God's own Self immediately and not in some mediated way, and so on.
And if our adult clone with knowledge of alcoholism (who never actually drank), or let’s even say the clone has false memories of being a lusting sex addict and also false memories of recovering from that…technically the clone never lusted, but the clone would understand the situation of a person who has a problem with lust (again not a perfect analogy).All of that makes sense, but does that preclude the possibility that God is intimately aware of my conscious experience as I experience it. I don't see why that should be the case.
I can see how this would be the case, us being a composite of lower level hindbrain subconscious processes, and a higher level conscious will that plays as final mediator…we would miss a lot of that complicated interaction, God would see it all.At any rate, let's say for the sake of argument that God is aware of my conscious experience as I experience it. If that is the case, then God knows my experience just as I know it. More than that, God knows my experience better than I know it since God is privy to unconscious motives and whatever else is down there that passes by my awareness. Add to that, God knows this ultra-intimate experience in all sentient beings.
This is another very interesting idea that I will think over, us dragging God through mud & filth when we sin, so that God is sort of experiencing it yet not partaking in it. It would seem to fit a lot of passages. I also need to think a lot about this as related to the problem of evil.Assuming God knows our lived experience just as we do, then we can say that God knows our experience of sin, and again knows it better than we do. How we experience desire and then act on that, God knows that, too, because God knows our experience better than we do. The uncomfortable aspect of this is when I sin, I end up dragging God through that experience, which is a horrific thought in itself. But I see no reason to assume this should not be the case. It is not as if God is sinning, even though God knows my sin experience intimately, since the responsibility for my sin is my own desire. If I had chosen well, that would have been what I "dragged" God through instead of my sin. I think this speaks to how much God loves us, as well, in that God is willing to endure our mental life, as bad as it can be, for the end goal of redeeming it.
I was definitely kicking that idea around in my head for a little, but it was just when I was entertaining the idea that God is less than omniscient. If God is omniscient then that falls apart.And, what does our evil really do to God? The cross/resurrection shows us evil has no power over God, so it's not as if we can taint God or rub off some of God's holiness. If God can become incarnate, God can handle it. What is an odd idea to me, is the idea that God learned something new through the incarnation, as if God would not know our experience until God became one of us.
This is great food for thought.If any of that is correct, which I have no idea if it is, then what could we say about passages like "Because he himself suffered when he was tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted"? Perhaps that's more of a revelation to us than it is to God. We need to know that God knows our experience of temptation and suffering, and the incarnation communicates that, but that doesn't mean that God didn't know all along.
I was going to say I agree, but I went and thought twice about this: You said, "God needed to be human to experience the human side of things." I can understand the thinking that comes to that, but do you have anything from scripture that actually gives that slant to it —that God had to "experience" it? When it says we don't have a High Priest who cannot be touched by our infirmities, it only implies, since we know that he did experience it, that there is no question that he understands it.No it doesn't say in what way Jesus was tempted, just that he was.
God needed to be human to experience the human side of things. I'm not fully sure what to make of it, but God became intimate with the human race in a new way through being born as a baby. That's one major thing that separates Christianity with other religions.
I like it! If it’s basic enough the knowledge doesn’t have to be contemplated, like if someone asks you what 1 + 1 is you know it’s 2 without needing to “Live through” adding 1 + 1 in your head, the answer is just sort of there. Or if you just look at something circular you innately just know without thought processing that you’re looking at circularity. And for God this would be true for anything no matter how complex, and in fact even more so because having to process anything at all isn’t even a God requirement, all knowledge is automatic.I think I would start looking at this by asking whether God knows anything in the same way we do. For example, when we start learning about the truths of mathematics in kindergarten we take two marbles and put them together with two other marbles and begin to understand that two plus two equals four. Surely God does not have to do that, and it may be the same with experiences.
All the physics involved for every single motion of every atom involved in the unfolding of the event of injustice, combined with every single atom involved with the physiological anger response to the physical event of injustice is intelligible in a way that relates to physical extension in space. But the having of the anger experience itself is an additional ingredient to the entire scenario which is not physically intelligible (it’s beyond the physics that it correlates with).Although there are different theories of emotion, it is often taken to be intelligible. For example, anger arises when an injustice is perceived and the physiology is excited in a way that prepares it to "do battle" in order to rectify the injustice. Lust arises when there is a strong desire for venereal pleasure.
Yes in God we would have the emotions, yet without the physical correlates. Or a qualia zombie with all the same physiological processes as the human yet without any of subjective emotions.Generally we would say that God possesses anger, or desire, or jealousy in an intellectual way that is not accompanied by bodily changes and undertones (since God is immaterial).
Ok I think that I’m becoming sold on this idea now.Does God know what it is like to have a bodily experience of anger? I think he does simply because he is the creator and sustainer of all things (including bodily anger). Like other things, God's knowledge of human emotion is not grounded in the same way it is for humans (i.e. by experience), but that does not mean he does not have the knowledge. For humans experiential knowledge presupposes experience and memory, but it is likely different for God.
You were right, I misinterpreted the interview. After realizing that my OP basically was a lie about what William Lane Craig really believes, so I didn’t wanna leave it up, and if the OP was a mistake I figured I may as well scrap the whole thing.(This is why I was referring to emotions and divine impassibility in the thread you deleted)
I was going to say I agree, but I went and thought twice about this: You said, "God needed to be human to experience the human side of things." I can understand the thinking that comes to that, but do you have anything from scripture that actually gives that slant to it —that God had to "experience" it? When it says we don't have a High Priest who cannot be touched by our infirmities, it only implies, since we know that he did experience it, that there is no question that he understands it.
Hunger may be a good example of something we can feel but God can't. (he might feel hunger, not sure)
I think most Christians would say that temptation, in and of itself, is not sin. However, I came across a contrary view regarding temptation held by John Calvin. Calvin, who usually agrees with virtually anything Augustine says, takes a different view of temptation.
"Content to designate it with the term "weakness," he (Augustine) teaches that it becomes sin only when either act or consent follows the conceiving or apprehension of it, that is, when the will yields to the first strong inclination. We, on the other hand, deem it sin when man is tickled by any desire at all against the law of God. Indeed, we label "sin" that very depravity which begets in us desires of this sort" (Institutes III.III.10).
One possibility is that Calvin is being inconsistent. Perhaps in other places he argues that temptation, in and of itself, is not sin but then fails to be consistent in this passage. As it stands, this passage clearly indicates that temptation is sin. In fact, the nature that could possibly sin (i.e. depraved nature) is itself sin, according to Calvin.
That's an odd position to hold, in my opinion. What would make this opinion even more controversial is the implications it has for our Lord's Incarnation. I think the orthodox position is that our Lord was tempted, but did not sin. If Calvin argues that our Lord was tempted, then (based on this passage) he would also have to conclude that our Lord sinned in even being tempted. I seriously doubt Calvin would be comfortable with that conclusion (although, Calvin is comfortable with all kinds of positions that make most folks uncomfortable). So, assuming the above passage is his settled position, Calvin is not being consistent.
At any rate, what do you think. Is being tempted itself a sin?
I think most Christians would say that temptation, in and of itself, is not sin. However, I came across a contrary view regarding temptation held by John Calvin. Calvin, who usually agrees with virtually anything Augustine says, takes a different view of temptation.
"Content to designate it with the term "weakness," he (Augustine) teaches that it becomes sin only when either act or consent follows the conceiving or apprehension of it, that is, when the will yields to the first strong inclination. We, on the other hand, deem it sin when man is tickled by any desire at all against the law of God. Indeed, we label "sin" that very depravity which begets in us desires of this sort" (Institutes III.III.10).
One possibility is that Calvin is being inconsistent. Perhaps in other places he argues that temptation, in and of itself, is not sin but then fails to be consistent in this passage. As it stands, this passage clearly indicates that temptation is sin. In fact, the nature that could possibly sin (i.e. depraved nature) is itself sin, according to Calvin.
That's an odd position to hold, in my opinion. What would make this opinion even more controversial is the implications it has for our Lord's Incarnation. I think the orthodox position is that our Lord was tempted, but did not sin. If Calvin argues that our Lord was tempted, then (based on this passage) he would also have to conclude that our Lord sinned in even being tempted. I seriously doubt Calvin would be comfortable with that conclusion (although, Calvin is comfortable with all kinds of positions that make most folks uncomfortable). So, assuming the above passage is his settled position, Calvin is not being consistent.
At any rate, what do you think. Is being tempted itself a sin?
Chuck Norris was once tempted to swim through croc infested waters, and it’s a sin what happened to the crocodiles. That’s the closest example that I could think of.No. I don't think so. But what really surprises me is that there's anyone out there who really thinks it is...
Is there?
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